Official Update Thread

[Cryptite]

The September/QoL Conquest Update
Loads of fixes, quality-of-life changes, and the September changes for the next vicious Conquest Cycle!

Fix ALL the Things!

• The majority of this update was to completely rewrite how the Data for Conquest works on the backend. This solves a ton of tiny bugs that were always cropping up during fights and should mean more stability during server restarts, and hopefully a lot less broken inhibs.
• This update branch started July 30th, so nearly a month of parallel work.
• 144 unique changelists.
• 70 file changes.
• 2,869 additions and 3,694 deletions
  • This means this update took out more code than it added!

Balak
Less protection, but also more freedom for participants. You can read more about this here.

• Balak no longer has a vulnerability window. If eligible to fight there, you can place whenever you want. The usual Continent Vulnerability Windows apply to all Balak fighting.
• As a result, there is no longer a Marathon (rip) which means there is no longer KoD on Balak (except during actual conquest fights of course).
• As a result of this, the Vuln windows for participants are no longer affected and so they'll no longer have up to 12 hour windows. 8 hours just like everybody else.
• Additionally, there is no longer a protection on Balak Participants for fighting back home. Being on Balak no longer guarantees you immunity from being attacked back on your continent.
• However, there is now a global restriction in which no town can have more than 2 Inhibitors onlining against it at any time. If you place inhibs on others, that does not affect this, so you could still have more than 2 fights going on at a time.

Golems
Don't despawn so much, also don't double up anymore.

• Fixed a lot of the spawning code so that they don't randomly despawn so frequently. They should be much more stable and not disappear in front of you from time to time.
• Fixed 2x/3x golem spawns. Should only ever be at most 4!

Beacons
Entirely overhauled to be through inventory-interfaces, no more Chat! More visuals to help show stuff.

• Major GUI overhaul. No more in-chat [Click Commands] anymore.
• Every aspect of warping to fights, requesting warps, requesting to fight for reinforced fights, etc. This now all driven by an in-game menu when you click the Beacon/Spawn Beacon button.
• Accepting merc requests and beacon warps are still in chat commands, but at least for the former, that can become a GUI at some point (probably with player heads). We'll likely keep beacon-warp requests as chat commands because that way you can still approve them from the battlefield.
• You can now see lots of extra information about fights in an organized way including how many people are warping to specific fights, etc.
• You can now remove yourself as a merc in the Beacon GUI by shift-clicking a fight that you're allowed to go to.
• When warping, a ring of End Rod particles now spawns around all beacons/spawn beacons. This indicates how close you have to be still get warped by the beacon.
• The destination warp particles for beacons (when players are about to warp in) that start at 15s have been changed to a neat new effect. It should now be easier to tell the exact moment the warpers will arrive.
• FIXED: You can no longer use a beacon at all if you are locked to another town. Previously, you could, but then when you teleported, you'd just get immediately kicked back to spawn.

Modules
Lingering was 2 stronk, slow had no counterplay.

• Lingering Death Module Changes:
  • The Bleed applied has been decreased from 8s -> 7s
  • Module fire rate has been increased from 15s -> 30s (only has 1 cloud per module, rather than 2).
  • The Lingering Death Zone (bedrock) no longer heals allies.
• Slow Module Changes
  • Now acts just like Lingering Death. Will shoot at nearby enemies and a zone of Prismarine will grow on the ground. Players that stand on this prismarine will receive Slowness II for 7s until they get off of it.

Lamps
Easier to tell their health now

• To better differentiate the heal of lamps, they now smoulder more strongly at the various percentages. Additionally, at 40% and 20% health, sparks will begin to fly out of the modules so you can see when they're almost down.

TGens
More explody bits at the end and a new Core mechanic!

• When the Core explodes, the crystal on top of the TGen now also explodes and smoulders for awhile! It will regenerate when that TGen can be attacked again.
• New Core Attack - Combustion
  • Combustion - A random attacking player or Endermite will be selected to become a Bomb. That player has 6 seconds to get out of the area before detonating, doing massive damage to all players within 10 blocks and within Line of Sight of the bomb.
  • In the case of a lovely Endermite receiving it, then players will need to flee the area before it explodes, for Endermites are not hasty and have no concerns for this world or its inhabitants.
  • The player who actually has Combustion will receive minor damage.
  • If the player or Endermite are slain while they have Combustion, they will immediately detonate.

Misc

• Beheading on Balak is global, not just on your home continent.
• You can no longer call Reins on Wilds fights...
• Fight Saves - Lamp Health will now persist through server restarts. Core health does not yet, however.
• A lot of verbage was changed, moved around, reworded, etc. There were still many places where the messaging behind why you couldn't do X was confusing, or flatly wrong. The messages should be more informative and accurate. You should always know why you can't do something. If you find these things still confusing, wrong, or missing, please /report!
• Tons of bugfixes and performance updates, all mean to continue to reduce the number of lagspikes that happen during Conquest fights. There's still work to be done here, but this update is a big step in the right direction towards planning for the future as well as cleaning up a ton of old/bad code that was written years ago when Conquest first released.

 

[Cryptite]

• New Bountiful Territories will no longer appear during Truce Period
• /rb should actually just be fixed now.
• A whole ton of /c train fixes. Switching sides was all kinds of messed up.
• Further Discord sync fixes. You may still need to clear your Discord one (maybe last?) time.

 

[Cryptite]

• Inhibitor Modules are now destroyed when the first lamp is destroyed. This was always supposed to be this way, but, welp, it never worked. So now it does.
• Boat Optimizations
  
  • Starting work on optimizing how things (mostly boats) "paste in" on Loka. In the old way, virtually the entire boat was pasted at once, which could cause a small lagspike (we're talking under 50ms). Though it was small it was enough to cause noticeable hiccup on any players on the server. At low-pop, this isn't noticeable, but when we get above 40-50 players, it can get heavier and those are frequently when Conquest fights are happening.
  • In the new system the blocks to place are spread out over a small period of time. This should both spread the work out, leading to no big lagspikes, but it also looks cooler tbh.
• Fixed Bountifuls not going away when it's truce period.
• You can no longer release (or see the option to) Rivina/Balak territories in /c list

 

[Cryptite]

• Fixed Inhibitors' projectile (TnT/Lingering Death, etc) modules firing "straight down" at players. They will now shoot at players outside of their constricted protection region.
• Fixed Inhibitors displaying that a ??? module was destroyed on the 2nd/3rd/4th power sources destroyed.
• Fixed TGens clearing out their modules at the end of a battle, regardless of who won.
• Fixed players being able to activate beacon warps before the fight had actually started.
• Fixed TGen doors not opening when defenders successfully defend the fight.

 

[Cryptite]

• The Hide Enchantment FX /profile setting now works everywhere (used to only apply in Battle Zones).
• World Capital Guards (I think there're only two at the moment, outside of the War District) will now update to be called (presently) Valentia Guards and will sport shields that have the world capital's /g banner look. We will likely add more of these around spawn in time. We're finally catching up on adding decorations around the world that reflect the current World Capital (since they no longer have a Capital Hall by default).
• Core Attacks/Updates (sub cores, wither, etc) should now only send to players inside of the building (or close-by), rather than to ALL players involved in the attack world-wide.
• Player FX (the 2 the Supporters have) now start/stop based on movement. There will be trail FX in the future, but for now, all other effects will only play when you're standing still.

 

[Cryptite]

• Fixed Inhibitor Modules not working at all.
• Inhibitor Modules now are destroyed after 2 Lamps have been overloaded, rather than just one.
• Fix some issues where beacon warp timers weren't showing for people.
• Fixed Lingering/Slow module blocks overlapping each other (and then not cleaning up after the effect was over).
• More /c train fixes.

 

[Cryptite]

Not too much notable, other than some backend fixes for things and some admin commands.

• Most notably, Golem Protectors' name tags will now show as Red/Blue based on their alignment to you. Previously, Red golems were always on Inhibs and Blue (Aqua) ones were always on the TGen. Now they will always be red if enemies, blue if friendly, and so should make a lot more sense to people.
• Also fixed some inconsistencies with gear obfuscation in battle zones. This may fix swords not hiding their enchantment fx in battle zones if toggled off (which may thusly improve FPS for players in big battles).

 

[Cryptite]

Loads of PvP Game Fixes

• Gear in virtually ALL matches no longer show as enchanted. (FPS Saver)
• Holy Grenade talent has been fixed.
• Fixed basically a ton of bugs all over the place related to all kinds of things (PvP Minigames are full of a lot of very, very old code).
• Matchmaking and Late Joining for VotA and VoC are in progress now.

 

[Cryptite]

A revamped Towns List!
And continued minigame fixes

• /c ranks, /town list, /town apply have all been consolidated into one, far more organized and manageable GUI. The commands still work, but all point to the same place and may likely be relegated to just a single command in the near future (probably /towns, or something).
• Feedback is welcome, as finding a way to describe all the things we need to can be a bit tricky.

VoC Works!

• Vale of Conquest has had a ton of bugs fixed over the weekend. Many thanks to all the people who helped re-queue endlessly and get consistently kicked out of VoC's while I fixed endless bugs.
• As a result, however, VoC now works pretty well. Late-joins are also functional now so you can join games that are in progress.
• A few talents have been looked into/fixed as well:
  • Freyjia's Arrow - now applies Weakness I, instead of Weakness II. This may make it so that you can still damage players when debuffed by it (testing required).
  • Holy Grenade - now works.
  • Others were acting strangely, and now work.
• Battlegrounds in /pvp should now properly show games, queue statuses, and games-in-progress. When queued for a Battleground, you'll now see players queued. The queue-length thing is only really gonna be for arenas for now.

Go Forth!

 

[Cryptite]

• Fixed a bug in which players locked to other towns were unable to request to fight for reins fights.
• /g info now shows a single-town GUI for inspecting a town. Viewing a town's members will soon be updated into a GUI as well, but for now, /g members is still the way to go.
• Fixed a lot of various bugs with Beacon/Spawn Beacons GUIs as well as cleaned up and reorganized a lot of the text they show. They should be a slight bit less confusing.
• Fixed a bug in which players who were accepted to reins fights saw the beacon countdown, but weren't actually registered to warp yet.
• Fixed a bug in which Beacons wouldn't auto-update sometimes.
• Fixed a bug in which each town/spawn beacon that was warping players to a fight spawned the Warp Destination swirling particles. Now only one set of particles will be spawn which should hopefully kill less computers.

 

[Cryptite]

• Fixed the Almighty Radars Bug - You may commence destroying radars at your vengeful leisure.
• Fixed a bug in which winning a fight at a territory adjacent to a dock always counted as a claim, rather than a neutralize.
• Found the parts of Frodii's Dinghy and have reassembled it properly. This also fixes bugs in which "destination boats" weren't ever going away (including the one at the Kalros Fishing Tournament).

 

[Cryptite]

• The Global Policy of Fish! Wonderful Fish! has been implemented. This is a server-wide policy that is not just limited to the World Capital/Alliance. Enjoy catching some bigger fish!
• The constricted protection region around Territory Generators and Inhibitors have been decreased and increased respectively so that they fall right on the edge of the andesite blocks of each building. As a result, you will be shot at so long as you're outside of the building zone, and Lingering Death and Slow module areas will now expand right up to the edge of the building:
• Regrettably, both buildings still have a "square" protection region. At some point in the future we will likely update this to be properly octagonal so it's perfectly accurate.
• As a result of this, in your own towns you will now find you can build right up to the edge of the TGen, as opposed to being awkwardly blocked when you're 2 blocks out from the edge of the tgen.

 

[Cryptite]

Loka Pack users and more, Rejoice!

• All sounds that Loka plays as part of its experience are now subject to client-side volume settings.
• Previously, all sounds played on Loka, whether they were vanilla sounds or Loka Pack unique sounds were a fixed, unchangeable volume. This caused much consternation and gnashing of teeth; leading some to either not use the loka pack, or edit it themselves in order to remove some particularly unsavory sound effects.
• No longer! All sounds we play have now been given Sound Categories which correspond to the various volume sliders in-game. Most of the sounds should be in the right categories, but inevitably there may be some that correspond to the wrong ones. If you happen to hear a sound that's not the right volume, and manage to figure out what category it maybe should be in, please /report.
• The vast majority of sounds played fall under Master, Ambient, Hostile, or Player sound effects. Ambient may be the one people are most interested in, as it's where the zone sound effects are played. If you turn down your Ambient sound category, it will also turn down the volume of the ambient sound effects for zones (spawn, nether, underground, etc).
• Remember you can use /pack in-game to get the pack, see what version you're on, and test sound effects. Loka's experience is vastly improved by having the sound pack!

Go Forth and turn it up!

or down, whatever

 

[Cryptite]

• Town Tax Chests have been removed. This arcane requirement is no longer necessary. Tax collections go to the Town Escrow (accessible via your tgen NPC or, if applicable, your town's job NPC). This is the same as collecting Bountiful Territory rewards and will continue to be the standard for "collecting things your town made" in the future. So, you can get rid of that weird Tax Chest you have in some strange level 5 zone somewhere.
• /c ranks, etc now properly sort by conquest strengths, and then town level.
• Shards, Shard Clusters, and Shulkers that have items in them can no longer be sold on the Market. Empty shulkers only, you scammers.

 

[Cryptite]

• Teleporting on Horses should be a little smoother now, as well as work in more places:
  • Using a Recall Stone
  • Teleporting to Conquest Fights
• Fixed bugs where Horses could tp places and Donkeys couldn't.
• Fixed some various Embargo/Rotting bugs with some resource blocks. This hopefully includes some issues with the eternal rotting terracotta
  • OF NOTE: Terracotta and some things you have already placed in your town may still rot when you break it. However, what was fixed was properly tracking these "placed blocks". Thus, any future terracotta/clay/etc you place in your town should hopefully no longer rot if you immediately break it afterwards.
• Fixed Armor Stands not spawning in towns (this was due to fixing other issues where mobs could sometimes spawn in towns)

 

[Cryptite]

• A whole host of back-end performance updates revolving around Regeneration (including many, many fixes to the system) have finally been implemented. Extremely large-scale regeneration, while the server is running, is now possible (if ever needed; which usually isn't).
• With this Shulkers in The End should now hopefully regenerate once again!
• As well, Regenerative Locations (docks, RI's, end, nether, etc) should all do a better job of staying "clean".
• A bunch of other small and various fixes and new bugs were added as well!

 

[Cryptite]

• Cleaned up a few remaining bugerinos surrounding the aforementioned Regen fixes.
• You can now copy and make zoomed-out Maps once again.
• The Ore Exchanger no longer accepts Custom Items.

 

[Cryptite]

• Update to Nomad -> Neutral Fights:
  • When nomads are trying to setup a town on a neutral, Inhibitor golems will only be friendly other Nomads. As a result, ALL other players will be enemies to BOTH the tgen and inhib golems so that you can decide which side to fight for. This allows players to put nomads out of their misery if they so choose, rather than just camp the battle zone for an hour.
• Setting up a beacon in your town is no longer subject to floating checks. It's your town, if it floats, you figure it out. It'll still check for collisions with blocks/walls/etc.
• Fixed the [Request Reinforcements] button (shows up right when you setup an inhib) letting the defenders accidentally call as the attackers. That's why some of the reins were weird.
• Stop letting people have less than 0 strength.

 

[Cryptite]

It's Yuletide 2018!

• Spawn is now BIG and FESTIVE!
• Vanilla Change
  • Ender pearls can now fail. In order to preserve some sanity both for players as well as anti-cheat, if you pearl into a half-block (defined below), the ender pearl teleport will fail and refund you the pearl. It's dumb to be able to pearl into a fence and then glide through it like some sort of ghost person, and it also causes problems with anticheat (as I'm sure you are all well aware).
  • Blocks that count in this circumstance include: Doors, Trapdoors, Fences, Fence Gates, Beds, Cauldrons, Brewing Stands, Hoppers, Skulls, Glass Panes, Cobble walls, Iron Fences, and a few others.
  • This could likely be tweaked, but it's one of those "Minecraft sucks and this shouldn't even be a thing, so we're gonna see if we can't make it smoother" circumstances. We feel it'll lead to less awful getting-stuck, or even dying-in-wall circumstances.
• Fixed some lag spikes of varying sizes and causes.
• New Mechanics for Making New Towns!
  • Some quirks here are still in progress and/or being fixed, but since it's in, here's what's changed:
  • Setting up a town on a neutral - 15m inhib as usual.
    • Inhibitor Golems are friendly only to Nomads. Otherwise, if you live on the same continent, TGen and Inhib golems are both unfriendly to people in towns and, as such, players are free to choose which "side" of the fight to be on. This means you can actually put a stop to new-town fights if you want, rather than just camping out for 60m and slaying newbz.
    • If you do not live on the same continent, both TGen AND Inhib golems will be friendly to you, as you are not allowed to interfere with the fight. Though you can still slay the newbz.
  • Setting up a town on an unlocked, owned territory - 60m inhib, is like a normal Conquest battle, and the Nomads are able to call for Reinforcements.
  • Setting up a town on a locked territory, or one that is adjacent to another town - 60m inhib, like a normal Conquest battle, but Nomads are not allowed to call for Reinforcements.
  • There are some other quirks we're still working out. For both instances of fights on a territory that's already owned by a town, Nomads will be unable to use /home to insta-tp back to the fight if they die. Somehow we have to get them to use the spawn beacons, or retrofit /home as some sort of wave-based return to the fight. Still being discussed.
• And as always, various other fixes, and new bugs and lagspikes added.

 

[Cryptite]

The Animal Purge Begins
Hide yo chickens, hide yo sheep

• As described in this thread, animals will now despawn in towns unless they meet the criteria mentioned therein. This is likely to remove thousands of excess animals milling about in (some) towns and help the server at peak times.
• Just within the restart of the server and about 2 minutes after coming online, over 3,000 animals have already been despawned in towns. We were hitting in excess of 25,000 entities during peak sometimes.
• Kairin at spawn (Pearl Vendor) now sells Nametags for 16 shards a piece.

Conquest Fixes

• You must now be locked to a town in order to call Reins for that town.
• An onlining Inhibitor will now prevent an unlinked Territory from neutralizing mid-startup/fight.
• Fixed Discord Inhibitor alerts showing the wrong time to online.
• Fixed a lot of instances where people could use /c merc when they weren't supposed to.